Flowing and Framing Two Exhibitions in New York Recall Arcs

Curator Lucy Liu’s Dream of Arches

The Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Romans used the arch to span and enclose space as a building and framing technique. The Ponte Molle (Pons Mulvius) built by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus in 109 B.C. in Rome, with seven arched spans, is still standing. For Arcus in-house Rachel Uffner staff member Lucy Liu unites the work of thirteen artists who use the storied arch as a framing device, or whose work includes domes or non-architectural but reminiscent circular or oval forms. Layering past and present styles, reality and myth, Angela Wei’s Fallen Angel painted in manga style depicts a putto donning cute trainers and a floral farmer’s bonnet falling, head-first, through the oculus (top center) of a renaissance-style dome, along with Cupid’s arrows. What brought on this scene, a summer break-up? It’s giving me a snapshot of the downfall of love. Unassumingly curious, Anne Buckwalter’s Three Stories gives us a detailed glimpse of a three-storied house, an arched window with a full moon crowning its top bedroom. The work’s flatness is interrupted by objects discarded on the floor, an open book, a soccer ball, a stray piece of paper, one boot–whose are they and what are they doing there? More poetic and eerie, Ronan Day-Lewis’s ghostly arch is part-architectural element part creature bulbous it stands in front of a carnival scene in dusky hues of purple and red. Taking a break from the summer heat in the airconditioned gallery I find myself imagining a wealth of storylines to go with these quizzical figurative works.

More settling is Piper Bang’s Still Life with Juice, a still life of vessels holding fruit in front of a masonry archway, and Lucia Rodriguez Perez’s three balconies where the architectural elements focus the gaze and mind. My favorite moment in the exhibition is Sacha Ingber’s Conspiracy of Mass a highly ornamental sculptural triptych that combines metals, watercolors, concrete, and, inventively, chicken bones with Miwa Neishi’s ceramic works installed on either side. Like in Buckwalter’s work, a full moon presides over the scene. The Afro-Brazilian artist Matheus Marques Abu paints metal gates designed with “adinkra”—shapes derived from ideograms brought to Brazil from Ghana by enslaved people who carved them on gates and windows. I first saw them at Galeria Karla Osorio. Inberg, who is also Brazilian, shapes the top of the three panels in her triptych and recalls them as well. Creating a soft framing, the triptych is flanked by two of Miwa Neishi’s rounded ceramic vessels presented on pedestals—Bridge, Tide, and Arch, included in the exhibition, shapes present both a mastering of technique and dimension to the exhibition’s theme. Overall, Arcus is an inventively put-together collection of reoccurring motifs and meetings between techniques, materials, and subject matter.

-Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Arcus curated by Lucy Liu is on view at Rachel Uffner, New York through August 16.

Paul Rho ”The loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time”*
*Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

The pulsating rythm of Paul Rho’s work recalls memories of the ocean, powerful, restful, and with an invisible apparatus. Rho’s practice has an origin in photography but expands into sculpture, performance, and sound. In his first solo exhibition in New York, Ebbs and Flows at Rockella Space, the artist activates the space through whispers and echoes of the waves, an actuality that never ceases. The different elements of the installation weave together multiple timelines and remind the spectator of a world one cannot control.

Comprising nearly the entire exhibition, “Tidal” (2023), a multi-media installation at the center of the one-room exhibition space consists of twelve monochrome spherical vessels on pedestals of various heights, placed in an oval formation. Above each vessel floats a porcelain bell, decorated with strokes of indigo. Each bell makes its distinctive sound interrupting a constant melody of water that fills the space. The installation is lit from above, which creates a variety of moon-shaped shadows overlaying one another on the concrete floor.

The vessels are made of undecipherable photographs, printed on Mulberry Hanji paper, and wrapped into the shape of a traditional moon jar. Characteristic of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), the moon jar, or in Korean dal hang-ari, is typically made of undecorated glazed porcelain, its convex shape resembling the full moon, and is today ubiquitous in Korean culture. Rho provides a layered take on the vessel playing with a double representation of the ephemeral and invisible, whether through the absence of clay (the moon jar) or the traditional expectation from photography.

Apart from the center installation, a black Hanbok (traditional Korean garment) is draped on the back wall of the space and framed with one distinct spotlight. Embedded into the wall, next to the Hanbok hangs a small monitor, showing a video loop of the artist performing with bells (from the installation) and dressed in the garment. The monitor functions as a window that provides an insight into what lies beyond the Gallery space. Here the representation dissolves and as I am standing in front of the Hanbok I can feel the garment’s weight on my shoulders, a time-consuming craft that deserves its elevation. As I look closer at the garment, the weft begins to move like the waves, with threads looping in and out of each other, and I recall these lines from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931):

The loop of the figure is beginning
to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a
figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the
loop.

Rho invites different senses to commingle as one enters into the center of the immersive installation. There is an analogy between the artist’s processes and the passing of cycles. The work stretches across space and entwines tempo, images and repeated sentiments. The layering of the soundscape flirts with the melodramatic. Yet Rho poetically manages to ask how to live and remain through an arc of time, through absences and estrangements.

-Anna Ting Möller

Ebbs and Flows at Rockella Space, Ridgewood, Brooklyn was open between July 7- July 21, 2024.

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